Bleak Doesn’t Begin To Say It: Dead Island

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It’s been quite a while since a trailer made me say, “Wow.” And indeed since one made me gasp, “Oh my God.” This CGI teaser for Dead Island – a zombie game originally announced in 2007 – is both stunning and horrendous. Bleak like your puppy dying of tiredness is bleak. The game itself sounds absolutely fascinating. An open-ended sandbox zombie survival game, first-person but with an emphasis on melee combat, where you must try to survive for as long as possible on an infested New Guinea island. We have little more to go on, other than the knowledge that Deep Silver are publishing, and that the people behind it are capable of a trailer as brilliantly morose as the one below.

There’s also word of it containing those infamous “RPG elements”, and oddly for a supposedly open-ended sandbox game, a focus on story. The melee is said to let you pick up almost any object you find, Dead Rising-style. And according to IGN who bring us all this info and lots more, because it’s set on a tourist tropical island, the place isn’t littered with high grade weaponry and ammo caches. Instead it’s about foraging and improvising with what you can find.

There’s to be drop-in four-player co-op should you wish to work together, or it works perfectly well in single player mode for lone survivors. And according to IGN, it’s “disgusting”. They’ve got a ton of screenshots and artwork over there.

It’s set for a 2011 release, but nothing more specific than that. Hopefully we’ll be seeing something from inside the game soon enough. As a concept, it sounds fascinating – just hardcore surviving, improvising, scrabbling to keep going. It’s what zombies were made for.

“Short film” – I was thinking the same thing after watching it. Doesn’t even matter that it’s a trailer to a game that may or may not be worthwhile, this little short film definitely left an impression on me.

Haha, yeah that soft piano is essential to making a good action game trailer these days.
[(Amount of gore * Emotional close-ups) / (Number of instruments * Beats per minute)] ^ (1 + number of sequels) = Epicness

John, that IGN preview you linked to doesn’t say anything about ‘sandbox’ gameplay. It says this:

“Dead Island’s developers call it a “first-person zombie-slasher/action-RPG.” That’s a mouthful, and it’s still unclear what the balance will be among those descriptors. Players will be able to choose from a cast of pre-set characters, including a former rapper named Sam B (the only character revealed so far).”

And…

“Although Dead Island is a story-based experience, it’s built for co-operative play, and Deep Silver says up to four gamers can drop in and out of the game seamlessly. But if you don’t want to play with friends, you can also play through the game alone… Although the player starts out as a simple tourist with minimal zombie-killing skills, his traits will improve along the way, thanks to a mini role-playing system built into the game. Although Deep Silver isn’t spilling all the details yet, we know there will be a leveling system and a skill tree. As the player progresses, his stats will increase and he’ll gain access to new combat abilities and animations.”

This isn’t a sandbox game, or if it is there’s nothing to that effect in this preview. To me it sounds like something they dropped along the way. IGN is billing Dead Island as a melee-combat-only zombie game. With a leveling system. And the only revealed character so far is a rapper. He has baggy jeans and a skull t-shirt – I think we can see him in one of the screenshots.

Folks, let’s not get too excited yet! Or if you do get excited, be careful what you get excited about!

It’s a bit of a shame they poured on the “bad things happening to innocent little girls LOOK LOOK HAPPY FAMILY HOLIDAY FILM BEFORE SHE GOT TURNED AND BIT DADDY”, because it’s just laughable. I’m sorry, this trailer is funny because it’s trying oh so hard.

The good bit is the fancypants backwards-forwards storytelling of it, but the actual OH NO THE CHILDREN is just overwraught ridiculousness.

I was more thinking of zombie games, you know. As opposed to zombie SURVIVAL games, which is usually the whole point of there being a zombie apocalypse, surviving. Just because games suck or turn away from this concept, doesn’t mean that zombies are about anything other than trying to survive.

And besides, zombies as a concept are a getting stale. They’ve been used and overused for nearly half a century now. Little of which was fresh, unique or innovative.

But ‘zombie’ isn’t a genre, anymore than ‘soldier’ is a genre. Call of Duty isn’t the same genre as Company of Heroes. Left 4 Dead isn’t the same genre as Plants vs. Zombies.

A ‘survival’ game isn’t the same as a game in which you ‘survive’, in the same way that everyone who is alive is not a ‘survivalist’.

There has been an overload of crappy, unimaginative zombie blasting games. 99% of zombie fiction isn’t about blasting zombies. It’s about survivalism. That’s what is interesting about the concept of a zombie apocalypse: how you would survive, not how many zombies you would blast.

You say the genre is tired. I say the genre is almost entirely unexplored.

You can call it a genre, a sort, a category or a science for all I care. I’m tired of seeing zombies and by the looks of it most other gamers would agree. You can have your semantics, I don’t care much for them.

It’s not a genre or category. The word your looking for is theme. And the theme has been abused. The beauty of Zombie apocalypses should be survival games. Instead we’ve had puzzlers and shooters (Though I do love me some L4D), which is a horrible misuse of the theme.

“I’m tired of seeing zombies and by the looks of it most other gamers would agree.”
I don’t know what gamers you are looking at – everybody I know can’t get enough of them (probably because there isn’t enough good ones that represent that survival element).
The whole “zombie games are overdone” kind of attitude seems to occur from some sort of robotic response which seems to think that too much of something quite apparent is a really bad thing. Of course, if nobody talks about it as being overdone, then we don’t think about it as being overdone. The key here is overt, visible overdoneness. Unfortunately, nobody seems to talk about romance movies or Mcdonalds or marriage or automobiles, and whatever else is far too common for people to even realize it’s too common as being overdone. :( what a pitiful society we live in.

The trailer was excellent, at least. They even managed to avoid the uncanny valley for the most part, despite all those close-up shots. As for the game itself, it might be just the thing I was looking forward to. This looks something like what I hoped Dead State would be when I first heard about it.

Big hopes for this, Techland is a quite unknown but good developer. Go check Call of Juarez 2: Bound in blood if you want to see their best work. A bit clunky gameplay, but a solid wild west shooter with stunning graphics.

Hadn’t seen that music video before. Almost as disturbing as this trailer, at the halfway mark when he’s wandering around London Underground tracks without an orange high-vis vest, ear defenders or a hard hat!!

Wow. I have watched twice, is great. Is double great, because if you play it the normal way, it looks like the children is abandoned to the zombies. But if you play it in reverse (in cronological order) is the other thing that dooms everybody. In any way you see it, is a master piece. Bravo!.

Pretty epic trailer they have there, I’m quite impressed to be honest. CGI trailers are all nice and stuff but they are no good at demonstrating what the game actualy is which is what gamers want, they want to be convinced that the game is awesome and they are the only ones not playing it. Give me a good gameplay video and I’ll buy it no problem, the concept is good.

actually in 2006 when Dead Island first appeared they also showed off Chrome 2. and Warhound, a hardcore military game (arma style). hopefully both those other projects are still alive on the backburner.

Wow indeed. I feel a little choked up after that.
This could be a pioneering game if it truly lives up to the level of emotion that the trailer has wrought into it.

I do feel a little apprehensive though. The setting and tone may be too bleak for a game like this. Zombie survival games are more often than not about the fun of culling the zombie hordes and the visceral combat. Marrying that kind of fun with the deep emotional depths of losing a child in such a horrible way could really either ruin the fun, or make a mockery of the heavy subject matter.

A film like The Shining or 28 Days Later is not fun to watch, entertaining but not fun. Games really always have to be fun, or up until now it has always been considered so and nothing around right now suggests that a game can be not fun to play yet still entertain and be considered a good game.

So treading this line of serious story with strong emotional depth and yet remaining “a game” with all that that entails is quite a challenge. Would I enjoy playing a game in which my character has to kill his own 7 year old daughter in order to survive? I don’t know.

An interesting point. Throught the trailer I was somewhat conflicted. You’ve got the zombie element that has been trivialised to the point of satire, ad infinitum, and then there is this heart-wrenching tale of loss, and absolute nihilism as you survive to survive, without the solid hope of rescue. I suppose the zombies will simply be a device, as they were in 28 Days Later, and it will simply be a marriage of concepts. But to say it is too bleak?

I suppose that something that was utterly depressing and draining would lose its public appeal, simply because it was unpleasant to play, but there is not nearly enough to be known about the story to reflect this. After all, if people desire, they could simply shut off from the story and just bash some zombie skulls in.

Also, I am still waiting for something that matches the intellectual and emotional provocation of The Road..

Not to mention you may be playing coop and trying to immerse yourself in the story. I would be annoyed to have to play though single player first just to avoid people dropping into the game and manically hopping everywhere stabbing furniture while I’m holding my daughter for a few precious moments before she turns.

I have played games that aren’t “fun” but still bloody good. I am thinking of one game in particular, Amnesia. That game wasn’t “fun” for me but it is still bloody good. Definitely on my top 3 of games last year. Same with the Penumbra games, although I only played Black Plague.

I really don’t think games have to be “fun” for them to be able to give worthwhile experiences. Sure, games haven’t really wandered far off the “fun” parts in the past but that is because very few have tried to do something which has its focus on something else than “fun”.

I was just going to mention Amnesia. That is a game that is not “fun” at all, and really emotionally draining. And it is excellent. It’s important to remember, though, that Amnesia pulled it off so well because it was designed with such a tight focus on creating its emotional response of fear; it was short and very simple in gameplay design. If Frictional had been going for a big blockbuster game with all sorts of gameplay gimmicks I don’t think it could have ever been as successful in what it did. But it does show that games don’t need to be fun to be good, and that they are capable of being more than just fun or exciting. I was also going to the mention The Road, which is a simply amazing novel and probably the bleakest thing I have ever read, and how I hope that someday a game could do something like that. Now that I think of it, The Road was also remarkably minimalist sort of like Amnesia was; the whole story consisted of not much more than two unnamed characters and the unrelentingly harsh world they inhabit. It was so powerful because of deeply it characterized those things, and how brilliant its prose was. If Dead Island can maintain the emotional bleakness in this trailer in the context of the big, detailed, open world zombie survival game it seems to be, it would be quite an achievement. I really, really hope it does.

We’ve not had a single zombie game yet except Dead State (which is still not out; curse you normal passage of time!) – but this looks like it might be a contender. Of course, I’m only going off that trailer rather than any concrete info but whoever made it seems to understand half of what makes zombie films.

I hope this finally gets to do the open world survival zombie game well. It needs to be bleak, to have an interesting world, to give you that impression of sudden change of rules (The Walking Dead-like). I don’t think anyone has done that in the recent history of games.

Also how exactly can one guy/gang of plucky teens armed with blunt instruments kill dozens of zombies whilst completely surrounded but the combined military and civilian police force can’t contain them when they still outnumber the zombies thousands to one.

Aww, don’t be sad – think of it as an alternate universe where the dead are turned back into living humans – kind of like a zombie version of Martin Amis’s “Time’s Arrow”. Sod the second law of thermodynamics.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the only thing this trailer does for me is demonstrate how inadequate and shallow most videogame narrative is; this trailer is strangely moving, and yet it leans on a visual grammar that’s the result of more than a century of artistic development in a medium that is intrinsically passive and whose limits are demarcated by the attention span of its viewers – not by the simulation of a rule-set, or graphical or physical fidelity, or a series of interlocking systems, spread across countless hours of play. Videogames are difficult. They can’t – or haven’t yet learned how to – unravel narrative in a compact, elegant manner, as apparently even an advertisement can.

They haven’t learned how to unravel complex linear narrative sure, but that’s really not something they *need* to do. And relying on complex systems is probably not the right way to go if you want to be expressive. Simple systems work best there. Complex systems are great for teaching complex lessons, but narratives, at least the powerful ones, are typically very *simple* at their core. I really think that’s a large part of why most games don’t manage to be emotionally engaging; there’s too much simulation and not enough raw interactivity. Agency requires immersion, and rules just get in the way of that.

If you want to split hairs over the definition of ‘game’, then you’re probably right though; anything that’s fundamentally about winning is going to be hard to use to express anything meaningful unless you subvert that motive like with Train. Mechanical systems cannot inherently provide context. If the focus is entirely on the mechanics there’s no way to get a message across. So the only time messages are going to get across is when the player no longer cares about optimizing for the mechanical system you’ve put together. Train breaks if players try to win it; the emotional impact is robbed if players don’t connect what they’ve been doing with the horror of the concepts underlying it and want to stop. And allowing players any incentive of any kind to optimize for your mechanical systems is going to shift the focus in that direction, so you have to subvert that desire in some way, or remove it entirely. It’s unclear if you’re still talking about a game once you do that.

If we’re talking interactive media though? You absolutely can do something really compelling.

I’m feeling unexpectedly and unquestionably owned by that trailer, for some reason.
I’m shallow enough that I think my general expectations for game trailers have dramatically increased in the space of three minutes.